Bookbinder - Street People: Invisible New York Made Visible

STREET

PEOPLE

INVISIBLE NEW YORK MADE VISIBLE

DAVID J. BOOKBINDER

TRANSFORMATIONS PRESS

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Copyright 2022 by David J. Bookbinder

Cover design by David J. Bookbinder

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner now known or hereafter invented without prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022908021

Published in Wenham, Massachusetts by Transformations Press.

Email:

Phone: +1 857-264-0312

Books: transformationspress.org

Images: phototransformations.com

Main: davidbookbinder.com

Instagram: @tranformationspress

For Linda, who got me started

and Gene, who kept me going

Contents

Foreword

We dont need philosophers or physicists to tell us that time is elastic and wrinkled. We experience it vividly those times that stretch out into every corner of our consciousness and rise monumentally above the flat ticking of our historical clocks, those times that are incredibly charged emotionally and bursting with meaning. Times like the seventies in NYC.

1970s New York was a mecca for artists, writers, and musicians drawn to its vibrant energy and creative possibilities. It was also a place of grinding poverty and urban decay, where crime and violence were everyday realities and hope danced with despair. In Street People: Invisible New York Made Visible , David J. Bookbinder exposes the grit and splendor of a city at its most raw and real. Words and pictures combine to create a graphic testament to this time, this place, and to the haunting people who inhabited it.

Prowl the nighttime streets with Margie the drag queen who inspired more than fifty works by Andy Warhol and Romeo, part-time mugger, full-time philosopher, and king of the corner of West 98th Street and Broadway. Set up shop at the crack of dawn with Morris Kavesh as he assembles Manhattans oldest newsstand, then spend the day with the denizens of his street corner society. Slip downtown and ride shotgun with amateur pimp and prostitute Frankie and Cookie on their first night out. Cross the bridge into Brooklyn to bear witness to Edward, the self-appointed Second Coming of Christ, here to bring down destruction on the human race.

Bookbinder was there as a perceptive and adventurous young man, an aspiring journalist with a notebook and a camera. He delivers the street in the wholeness of its violence, its sexuality, its poignance, in portraits so vivid that they fairly leap off the page and into our psyches. There, lodged like the earworms of old songs weve half forgotten, they summon memories we didnt know we had, sympathies we have suppressed. Bookbinders people are alive, eloquent in testimony of their humanity, unforgettable. He gives them to us for our astonishment and admiration, for our reflection a gift of great value to take in, to live with, to understand, in all their grotesqueness and their beauty, as we go from page to page with a growing sense of wonder.

The past is embedded in our present, in us. It may be grand, it may be inglorious, but it is inescapable, and the great danger is to forget it. Remembering, Carl Jung posited, is absolutely essential to a full development of the psyche. The same is true of a culture. To fail to remember is to be dangerously stunted.

In Street People , we remember. This book joins such classics as Agee and Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , Hubert Selbys Last Exit to Brooklyn , and Lou Reeds Walk on the Wild Side in its timeless portrayal of life on the margins. Experience this strikingly illustrated account of New York Citys forgotten people. Witness invisible New York made visible.

- Eugene K. Garber

A portfolio of the photographs and illustrations in this book is available at phototransformations.com

MANHATTAN

Margie

I always been attracted to beautiful womans. I admire them. Not sexually a woman dont arouse me, dont get me on but I always like to be like one. I always like to be a beautiful chick.

When I was a little boy, five or six years old thats as long as I can remember I always want to be a little girl. I used to daydream a lot, you know? I used to go to bed and I say, Oh, my God! I wish that when I wake up, I wake up in the morning a woman. Ah, to wake up as a woman in the morning When my family would go visiting, and they would sit in the parlor on the rocking chairs, I always used to sit on the mens laps. So devilish! I used to sit on the mens laps, just to feel them.

In school, the other boys call me sissy, and I was always fighting. But in a way I was lucky, because I always hang around with the girls, and they stick up for me. Most of the boys you know how cruel they could be they try to make fun out of me, try to beat me up or something, and the girls always chase em away. We were real pals. I always get along with the girls, and I always was with the group of girls. Thats the only way I could go through school. Although it was hell. It was really horrible, I can tell you.

My parents feel terrible about me, especially my mother. I was to a psychiatrist, and he told me that I identify with my mummy, because my father die when I was five or six years old. But I dont believe that. I was raised up by my mummy, and I grew up loving my mother so much, but I think it was a case of hormones, an imbalance of hormones. Whatever it was, as long as I can remember, I always been attracted to boys, instead of being attracted to girls. Sexually, you know?

Im 29 no, lets be truthful, Im 33. And I been draggin since I was 14 years old.

I was a pretty child: a teenage, gay, homosexual child. And I run away from my parents in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when I was 14 years old, and I join a company of female impersonators called the Little Parrot. Its like the Jewel Box Revue here, but they were all Spanish-speaking you know, Puerto Rican.

I didnt have no previous experience of the stage, but I meet the owner of the club hes a Puerto Rican singer, and hes gay and he was interested in me because I was so young and so cute, and that was what the people went to see: young, really cute boys in drag dressed as a woman. It was a gay club, frequented by mixed people. Many people went there for this reason or that: just to have a nice time, or to laugh at the faggots, or to see how they dress, or to ooh and ahh. You know, Ooh, how good they look! Like a woman! How could that be a man? and such and such. I could remember I do a dance called La Samba. I dress up as Carmen Miranda, with a full headdress with fruits and feathers and a bra and the whole costume, and I tico tico te, tico ta: I dance to the whole number. They announce me as Mr. or Mrs. Carmen Miranda. That was my hit solo number. And then there was the chorus.